Thoughts about technology, government 2.0, open data, collaboration, libraries and scientific publishing.

Posts categorized "Television"

July 03, 2011

UPDATE 2012-07-07: Situation in 2012 is the same. Live on the television on RDS and TSN2. If instead you live in the 21st Century and want to watch on demand on your computer in Canada... unlucky. ENDUPDATE

Here's a problem: distributing content. We used to either transport content (vinyl records, video tapes, CDs, movie film canisters) or transmit content to a geographically-limited audience (over-the-air broadcast television and radio).

And embedded into the model of content distribution that developed are "broadcast rights". The rights to display content to your particular region. A US TV show, a stream of bits, may show up on Canadian TV but with Canadian commercials inserted - the Canadian channels insert their commercials because they have the rights to "rebroadcast" the US TV show. US TV shows show up on Canadian cable, but some channels are simply prohibited. The satellite dishes and digital feeds at your cable company can receive any TV signal but you are not permitted to choose from the entire global set of offerings, only the licensed channels, the permitted content for your country. DVDs have multiple "regions", so a DVD from one region "won't play" (is enforced in software not to work) in another region.

This trend of enforcing boundaries through law when they no longer exist as technological constraints is a symptom of trying to preserve the content distribution "problem" when it has been solved.

For example in the US you can watch Jon Stewart's Daily Show on ComedyCentral.com and many websites will highlight particular segments of interest. All of the links for which don't work in Canada.

ComedyCentral.com will point you to the licensed Canadian channel, TheComedyNetwork.ca - but it won't preserve any of the context in the link it provides, so instead of the specific US clip, you just end up with the main Daily Show landing page in Canada. To find a clip when you have only a US link, you have to figure out exactly what show it was from, and then manually navigate to that segment on the Canadian site. It's ridiculous. It would be very slightly less ridiculous if they would at least take the time to map the US links to the Canadian links.

Effectively this kind of "geofence" breaks the web. I can say "look, here's a clip that explains my point" and link to the US site... and a Canadian clicking on the link can't see the content, they have to manually try to figure out what was linked to and navigate to it (pretty unlikely except for the very determined). A link is not a link, a page is not a page. A link is now artificially country-specific, a legal layer imposed on top of a borderless web.

Not only does this break the web, but in some sense it breaks capitalism. There is no free market, there is a geographically-enforced market. You can have the dollars ready to spend, but no one to take your money. Want to buy the Tour de France iPad app? Sorry, not in Canada. Want the NBC "All Access" Tour app? Sorry, US only. Want to watch the Versus Tour de France online coverage? Sorry, US only. Want to watch the Tour with various enhanced features on the TV2 Sumo website, or the France2 website, or the Eurosport website? Sorry, those choices are not permitted.

The situation is extra confusing as the Versus online coverage worked fine in Canada last year, it's only with their partnership with NBC that it's become US-only.

Ok, fair enough, want to watch the Tour in video on demand from a licensed Canadian source? Sorry, one does not exist. Don't have a TV and want to see the Tour in Canada? Sorry, no Tour for you. The only providers in Canada are broadcast television only, TSN2 and Evasion. Your money is no good here. (TSN does have streaming apps but they are provider-fenced. Through legal magic, the open Internet turns into one that is different depending on your service provider. TSN mobiletv only "exists" if you get the Internet through Bell and Virgin, not if you're on one of Canada's other huge ISPs such as Rogers.)

All of this to say, make sure that in your organisation you're not doing this, that you're not artificially restricting processes, people and content simply because it's the way it used to work (a typical example is content provided only on a departmental intranet when it could be provided to the entire organisation or the world).

You can see video of her interview with Mark Kuznicki as well as additional links in a posting on her City News cityonline blog, "All about ChangeCamp".

Incidentally, for those who think one technology kills another, this posting is an example of tech interactions - I saw the end of the story on TV, sent a tweet to Kris Reyes to ask about her blog posting, got her response, and then added info from her blog to this posting on my blog. New tech adds new capabilities, but it doesn't necessarily replace existing services.

Sidebar 1: Until I read the techPresident posting about Katie Jacobs Stanton, I had forgotten that Google Moderator existed (it's a ranking / discussion site, similar to digg, obamacto, or some features on change.gov)

December 12, 2007

So you can buy South Park or... well, South Park. Ok that's a bit of an exaggeration, the networks they currently list are CBC, Comedy Central, CTV and the NHL. There are only one or two shows from each; there are a total of 14 different shows up, with at most two or three seasons of each show.

Individual shows are C$2, entire seasons depend on the show, South Park is C$24, the Hills season 3 is C$36. It's a bit apples to oranges but the Hills season 2 DVDs are C$43 discounted at Amazon.ca

What rights will you have to content? Well Apple has its own ideas, but ultimately it will depend on Canadian copyright legislation. Currently the court interpretation of Canadian rights is pretty good, so of course, some organisations think that must be stopped.

It would be nice if we could get away from this idea of geographically negotiated content rights too - it is ridiculous that it takes months or years for content that is available in iTunes USA to become available in iTunes Canada, if it ever does. As it is, you can see that there are no US networks on iTunes Canada. In fact the whole concept of "US network" doesn't make much sense in the Internet world.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper unveiled a $1.5-billion fund yesterday to help provinces reduce greenhouse gases, allocating the first $350-million to Quebec on the eve of an expected provincial election.

The province of British Columbia is also setting a goal of a "33 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions from current levels by 2020".

TVO's The Agenda has had a couple recent shows on Kyoto and the environment, you can watch the video online (Flash format).

January 05, 2007

Online video for The Agenda - watch the January 4, 2007 episode. The SL part is about half-way through. Anthony D. Williams, one of the Wikinomics authors, was one of the panelists. Jesse Hirsh was another.

December 14, 2006

North of Toronto, the 140,000 men, women and children who are members of Vaughan Public Libraries have become virtual pioneers. The city's eight libraries -- seven of the traditional books-on-shelves variety and one e-library -- are the first in Canada to offer downloadable videos and television programs through the Internet.

Library patrons can access the material from anywhere in the world, any time of day, and they don't have to worry about any fines for late returns: The material simply expires from their computer when the loan period ends.

Forget about having to go to the library -- all across Canada, public libraries are embracing new technologies, ranging from downloadable e-books and audio-books to online research tools.

If libraries face a challenge with technology, it is not in adopting it but in informing people of the profusion of e-resources available, Ms. Scardellato says.

"The problem is we just don't have any effective way of promoting our various services," she says.

"We get 21 million hits a year to our website, but when it comes to the take-up rate for specific programs, those figures tend to drop dramatically."

What about getting Microsoft and Firefox to automatically install a browser extension that highlights local library resources? I think it's a tragedy that libraries spend millions to license content that patrons have no idea about. Free access to newspaper fulltext, for example, is almost always buried somewhere deep in an "electronic resources" subsite. Seriously, "Quick Links... Databases"? Who do you think is going to click on that?

The article, understandably, also doesn't address any of the content ownership and access issues. Is this content that the library actually owns, or are they paying to license DRM-protected content? Because if it's the latter, it means there is essentially an ongoing transfer of taxpayer dollars from the public library, to the private company that controls the content. And the minute that transfer stops, the content is gone, permanently inaccessible.

I just wanted to pass on some information about
a new Master's program - one of the many hats I wear is that of a
Virtual Research Consultant for the Centre for Digital Media at Great
Northern Way Campus in Vancouver, British Columbia. On Saturday,
November 25th, 2006 the Masters of Digital Media (MDM) program at the
Great Northern Way Campus will host an Open House for prospective
students from around the globe in the online metaverse Second
Life™, where a Virtual Centre for Digital Media building is currently
under construction. This event will be held in conjunction with a Real
Life Open House taking place simultaneously at Vancouver's Great
Northern Way Campus. At both events, potential students will learn
about an innovative graduate program in digital media planned to launch
in September 2007.

and for no particular reason, here's some info on the South Park "World of Warcraft" episode...Ok, ok, um, "in order to better understand the Gaming Generation, I present this insightful examination of using machinima to produce television".

South Park recently aired an episode involving World of Warcraft in which half of the show featured custom machinima footage....

Q: How were the custom animations created? How were they used inside of World of Warcraft - were they imported back into the game? What hardware/software did you use?

JJ: When Trey started thinking about how he wanted to start off the current run of episodes, he really wanted to do something big, and new. So, the idea of the "video game show" as we were calling it, resurfaced. We had a production meeting at Trey's house on Friday, Sept. 1st, and went over all the experiments and design work we had done to date. Once again, the idea was brought up of using WoW to shoot the in-game footage, with the added possibility of re-creating the characters in Maya, the 3D animation program we use to produce the show, in order to do close ups with full lipsynch and facial expressions. I mentioned that Blizzard had been very eager to help us when we ran our initial tests, so perhaps they'd be willing to let us use their own character models as well, which would save us a great deal of time and effort. All we would have to do then is re-rig the faces so we could animate them to the degree needed.

Eventually, it was decided that we would push forward in both directions, starting to model our own characters as well as contacting Blizzard and seeing how interested they would be in participating. We met with several people from Blizzard on Thursday, the 7th of Sept. and it became obvious that they were extremely eager to make this happen, and seemed willing to do whatever they could to make sure it did. Luckily, they also use Maya to do their in-game character animation, which meant we would be able to just grab their files and go, in theory. So, we asked them for a couple of their Maya character rigs to test with. Less then 7 hours later, we had male and female models for every race in the game, all fully rigged with every single animation cycle already assigned. It was exactly what we needed to get started.

November 21, 2006

I think that the Reuters presence in SL got the attention of a lot of other newsagencies. CISTI's Michael Ireland pointed out that there was a report on CBC TV's The National last night (this is the flagship news programme from our national broadcaster). They had a ten minute report--that's a major amount of time for a TV news show to devote. It's not available as a separate segment online--I have emailed them and asked them to "liberate" it.

UPDATE 2006-11-22: Colin located the story, including links to the video segments.

October 10, 2006

Combination Will Create New Opportunities for Users and Content Owners Everywhere

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., October 9, 2006 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that it has agreed to acquire YouTube, the consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience, for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction. Following the acquisition, YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community.

If this wasn't October, and Google wasn't a public company, I'd suspect this was all an elaborate practical joke.

In case you're wondering...

About YouTube

Founded in February 2005, YouTube is a consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience.

That's got to be the fastest billion made in the history of ever. From zero to a billion in 20 months.I'd like to hear that sales pitch: "YouTube: it produces nothing. It hosts videos other people create, and illegal video copies. Yours for only a billion dollars." Oh, and by the way, YouTube has no business model.

BIG IDEAS begins its sixth season with someone who ought to be familiar to many, if not by name, then by the title of the book he and his wife penned about 35 years ago: Future Shock. The co-author, Alvin Toffler, came through Toronto recently promoting the latest book in which the Tofflers again divine the shape of things to come. The book's title is Revolutionary Wealth and is an attempt to show how our traditional economic categories are subject to changes wrought by digital technologies. If you suffer from future shock already, this talk is not likely to assuage it.

which will air May 20, 2006 at 9:30 pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld.All episodes will be available online as Windows Media or QuickTime, currently only The End of Radio is up. From a library perspective, the blurbage for End of Print is interesting

Google Print, a full-text search engine of every book ever published launched the project late last year with much fanfare. The project has the potential to replace yellowing card-catalogs with a book search product as powerful and comprehensive as Google's search engine for the web.

Yeah, we really should think about some way to put that Public Catalogue Online so that it can be Accessed.

<rant>I do have an ongoing issue with the CBC (and other channels) that try to "youthify" their networks by bringing in youth experts who are... middle aged. George Stroumboulopoulos is not edgy. He's ancient. Street Cents is the only show that succeeds somewhat in this area, what with it using people who are actually like, under 30 years old.</rant>

The Economist recently looked at media from the reverse perspective, discussing blogs, wikis, and other usual suspects in a Survey on New Media - Among the Audience.

the Trotts decided to build a better “blogging tool”, which they called Movable Type. “Likening it to the printing press seemed like a natural thing because it was clearly revolutionary; it was not meant to be arrogant or grandiose,” says Ms Trott to the approving nod of Mr Trott, who is extremely shy and rarely talks. ...

These two incarnations of movable type make convenient (and very approximate) historical book-ends. They bracket the era of mass media that is familiar to everybody today. The second Movable Type, however, also marks the beginning of a very gradual transition to a new era, which might be called the age of personal or participatory media. This culture is already familiar to teenagers and twenty-somethings, especially in rich countries. Most older people, if they are aware of the transition at all, find it puzzling.

Calling it the “internet era” is not helpful. By way of infrastructure, full-scale participatory media presume not so much the availability of the (decades-old) internet as of widespread, “always-on”, broadband access to it. So far, this exists only in South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan, whereas America and other large media markets are several years behind. Indeed, even today's broadband infrastructure was built for the previous era, not the coming one. ...

The age of participation

... Last November, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 57% of American teenagers create content for the internet—from text to pictures, music and video. In this new-media culture, says Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future in California, people no longer passively “consume” media (and thus advertising, its main revenue source) but actively participate in them

In addition to the articles, there are five audio interviews (MP3 format).

The Wikipedia model is not perfect, but its success has implications that go far beyond how people conduct research. It puts a question mark over the whole idea that information must move from credentialed producer to passive consumer. That presents established companies and organizations with a big challenge. Media groups will have to find a way to emulate Wikipedia and bring readers and viewers inside the tent, as this newspaper is trying to do by, among other things, inviting on-line comments and organizing question-and-answer sessions with journalists. ... Government itself, that ultimate control freak, will have to open up to the views of its Web-empowered citizens. In the same way that Wikipedia presumes "collaboration among users will improve articles over time," government should learn to accept that collaboration among citizens can change things for the better.

If we can harness our collective wisdom the way Wikipedia has, the potential for unleashing human creativity is enormous. Instead of a camel, we just might create a unicorn.

This did not impress some people, such as

PAUL AXELROD

dean, Faculty of Education, York University

Toronto -- Your benign defence of Wikipedia (Wikipedia's World, And Where It Points Us -- editorial, May 1) is misplaced and naive. It is one thing to hail the Internet as a "democratic" venue for the expression of opinion, informed or otherwise. It is quite another for an "encyclopedia" with no academic standards and no discretion with respect to the choice of authors to pose as some kind of intellectual authority, and, worse, to be legitimized as such by The Globe.

Wikipedia's name gives the wrong impression, said Simon Fraser University communications professor Richard Smith. The open-source site (meaning it can be written and edited by anyone) is called an encyclopedia only for lack of a better term.

"It's socially produced knowledge. But they didn't know what they were producing when they began," Prof. Smith said, explaining that many of the volunteer editors are authorities on their subjects. "It's like being cool in high school: You build up social capital. You do something uncool and you're gone. If you lied on Wikipedia, you would shame yourself."

... new media or old, the same guideline applies: Always consider the source.

The Globe also had an article about modern photography. It went something like "Flickr Flickr, Flickrflickrflickr". That's it. Everyone is now officially banned from talking about Flickr. Find a new example. The article is One Giant Web Gallery.

Also in Globe world, Dave Chalk discussed web video in Nothing on TV? Where's my Canadian iTunes TV, that's what I want to know.

January 10, 2006

Google Video Store has mostly sort of gone live. It shows up as a line of shows for purchase on the main Google Video home page.

You can buy e.g. Star Trek Voyager - Tattoo for US$1.99 .You need to set up a Google Account, if you don't already have one.An AdSense account, for reasons unclear to me, is not a Google Account.If you click to set one up, it will prompt you for credit card.It wants your phone number "Used to verify your credit card".

Problem #1: I am giving out my phone number to companies when hell freezes over.

You know what happens when you give out your phone number? Hello telemarketers.

Problem #2: Only AFTER you enter in your address info in the State and Zip fields does it say, in glowing red letters

Must be a U.S. 2-letter postal code or state name

U.S. zip codes are like XXXXX or XXXXX-XXXX.

Might it be useful to mention this before you get people half-way through the entire purchase process?(As a side note, as far as I know, there are currently zero legal television download options in Canada - no, not through iTunes either.)

Problem #3: Although "classic" Star Trek (i.e. the original series) was one of the shows to be on sale that got people all excited, it isn't on sale yet. CBS shows under "classic" are: DS9, Voyager, Brady Bunch, Twilight Zone, I Love Lucy, MacGyver and Have Gun Will Travel. Clicking to see episodes of any of these fails, e.g. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, see all episodes...

Your search - in_label:tvshow=Star_Trek_Deep_Space_Nine did not return any results.

Problem #4: One for the archivists - Google Video adds new video DRM. So now we have DRM from Apple (FairPlay), Microsoft, Google and others. Here's a question: once you authenticate, say a song from Apple, can you

a) continue to play that song forever, without re-connecting to the Internet at some point?b) pass the song on to your heirs like any other piece of physical property when you die? pass it on to a library?

I am particularly concerned about (a). I suspect if you "buy" a song, authenticate, and then never reconnect to the Internet, it will eventually fail. If that's the case, it means if the master DRM servers of these companies eventually fail or are shut down when they go out of business, the things you thought you owned will cease to work.

November 01, 2005

A 21-minute version of "NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams" will
be available on http://www.MSNBC.com/ every weeknight beginning at 10
p.m. ET beginning Monday [November 7, 2005]. It's the first full newscast by a Big Three
network that will be available online for free.

"This is an
answer to all the well-meaning viewers who have stopped me in airports
to say, 'I try to watch as often as I can, but I travel or I have young
kids,"' Williams said Monday. "When the evening has calmed down, at 10
o'clock Eastern, 7 Pacific, you can watch it on a schedule that suits
you."

The newscast will have only one commercial per break, a
full-motion spot served by MSNBC.com. It won't necessarily be any
commercials that would have been on the newscast originally, said
MSNBC.com publisher Charlie Tillinghast.

October 14, 2005

The video iPod was foreseeable, here's what I wrote (elsewhere) in March 2005:

iTunes Video Store

I wondered why Apple put trailers inside of iTunes.

But I have figured it out.Apple is building the platform for selling video downloads the same way they sell music downloads.

Why do they host trailers on their site at all?Hmm, sort of a daily infrastructure test...

Why video inside iTunes? iTunes is crossplatform... sales platform...

Steve has said that portable
video (the "iPod Video") doesn't make sense. (There is already portable
Mac video, it's called an iBook or PowerBook.) But downloading video to
your desktop... or say the Mac Mini... Send the video over wireless to
your TV like they do with the AirPort Express audio thing...

Notice
how every time Steve does a talk he goes on and on about some new video
thing the Mac can do? I thought he was wearing his Pixar hat, but he's
actually building the Mac video infrastructure.

The man's a genius.

I still think video on the iPod is really the least important bit of the whole thing.There's still the device challenge which they haven't overcome: we want devices to be as small as possible, but we want displays to be as big as possible, and interfaces to be a reasonable size.I had thought they might at least do a 16:9 wide-angle display by turning the display sideways on the iPod and having a much smaller control area.

Plus which, mobile video seems a bit dubious to me. The only time I use it is when I watch stuff on my laptop on airplanes.

This is the most interesting video part to me, which I haven't seen widely mentioned:

purchase ad-free episodes of your favorite ABC or Disney television shows and watch them on the go.

The virtual shelves of the iTunes Music Store
now feature a video section. Music videos, Pixar shorts and select ABC
and Disney television shows live right alongside songs, podcasts and
audiobooks. Browse featured listings or search the archive to find just
what you want, then click to buy. Once you do, you get stutter-free,
ad-free video delivered directly to your desktop. From there, the sky’s
the limit, because you own purchased video forever.
Watch as many times as you choose, share between five computers, burn
to data CDs or sync to the new iPod. Instant gratification never looked
better. ...

TV Star

In addition to music videos, the
iTunes Music Store also features select Disney and ABC television
shows, ready to download. For $1.99, you can own the latest episode
just one day after it airs. With full seasons of “Lost,” “Desperate
Housewives” and “That’s So Raven,” plus episodes of new shows like
“Night Stalker” and “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody” at your
fingertips, you’ll never miss your favorites. Plus, you can sync shows
to the new iPod and watch them on the go.

I strongly agree with Steve's "people want to own, not rent" model.However, it's worth pointing out... this is the opposite model from the library model.

In any case, while the video is big news, there are also other developments that are just as important.They are making iTunes into a community:

Send songs, albums, playlists, even music videos and TV episodes to anyone with an email address. ...

Get personalized recommendations, courtesy of the iTunes user community
and a host of in-house music experts. Hear what's in store for you. ...

Post your own customer reviews and ratings, and read what over 10
million iTunes users worldwide have to say about what's playing on
iTunes.

September 17, 2005

As part of its series Me TV, CNet created a Me TV Wiki for its readers to contribute their ideas.

Welcome to CNET News.com's Me TV Wiki. Here, you can collaborate with
other readers to predict the future of television, collectively writing
and editing your own chapter of this special report. A few potential
points to address: How do you think people will watch TV in five years?
What kind of shows will be available to download, and at what cost? Will
30-second commercials become obsolete? Who will control the TV industry?
(As this wiki is an experiment, News.com reserves the right to close its
editing window and/or republish any of its contents.)

It's an interesting example of a publisher inviting reader participation. This is kind of ironic, because CNet bought TV Tome, in yet another example of a vast section of user-contributed content becoming corporate owned, and then turned it into (or replaced it with) TV.com ...which has annoyed people with ads, flash, lost capabilities and discarded information, in reaction to which users have created the TV IV Wiki to replace TV Tome.

Incidentally, if all you want to know is "when does the next episode air?" (which is usually my question), epguides.com can answer that for you (with links to more detailed info at TV.com).

March 06, 2005

Not only can you view the entire first episode of Battlestar Galactica online for free, you can now download a weekly podcast of running audio commentary from Ron Moore, to listen to as the episode unfolds.